Paranoids, take note: You can't escape AI, literally and figuratively.

While Amazon.com (ticker: AMZN) was being blistered by civil-rights groups for selling facial-recognition tools to law enforcement officials in Orlando, Fla., and Oregon, Intel (INTC) hosted a developers conference on artificial intelligence that underscored its growth. (Intel announced a range of machine learning software tools and hinted at new chips on Wednesday.)

"There is a vast explosion of applications," Naveen Rao, vice president and general manager of the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel, tells Barron's. "It has become as ubiquitous as computing in touching every one of our lives."

Its benefits are plentiful to businesses and consumers, revamping major industries and the workforce. Indeed AI is the rare technology that has more immediate financial impact in the consumer market--2016 sales reached $1.86 billion, says Kaleido Insights analyst Jessica Groopman.

But it also poses dangers inherent in applying technology that literally takes on human characteristics.

Amazon's Rekognition AI-powered technology would empower a "government-surveillance infrastructure that poses a grave threat to customers and communities across the country," a coalition of civil rights groups warned in a letter this week demanding that Amazon stop selling the program to law enforcement.

Amazon says it has made clear to clients they must "comply with the law and be responsible when they use AWS services," Amazon spokeswoman said Nina Lindsey said, referring to Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud software division that houses the facial-recognition program. "When we find that AWS services are being abused by a customer, we suspend that customer’s right to use our services," Lindsey said.

Rekognition was introduced in late 2016 to let marketers, content providers and other businesss analyze billions of images and videos daily. It can identify up to 100 people in a crowd, according to documents unearthed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. [Amazon, Microsoft (MSFT) and a raft of startups sell such AI tools to businesses.]

The Big Brother element comes in potential use of the technology. A police department, for example, could build a database of mug shots of suspected criminals that officers could have Rekognition scan against footage of potential suspects in real-time.

FBI downsizes encrypted phone instances. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has maintained for several months that encrypted phones stymied 7,775 investigations last year. It turns out that number is closer to 1,000 to 2,000.

"The FBI’s initial assessment is that programming errors resulted in significant over-counting of mobile devices reported," the agency said in a statement.

This pokes a sizable hole in the agency's contention argument against phone encryption used by Apple (AAPL) and Alphabet (GOOGL) division Google to protect consumer privacy. It was, in fact, the crux of the FBI's standoff with Apple over access to an iPhone found on one of the terrorists in the San Bernardino, Calif., attack in 2015. FBI calls the encryption conflagration a "Going Dark" problem.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has let his feelings known on the topic. He has called "Going Dark" a "crock."

The FBI's downsized numbers seem to support Cook.

Lost helped jump-start this Hawaiian firm.JamBios is a social media company that believes disaffected Facebook users want something more personal in the form of long written posts, photo albums and group discussions. Co-founder Beth Carvin has designed an ad-free network that highlights storytelling and "capturing memories."

The Hawaii-based company launched a year ago after Carvin met actor Henry Ian Cusick of Lost fame on the set of Rememory (2017). The movie tells the story of the discovery of an invention that can record and play a person's memory.

"Our approach is deeper and more personal than Facebook," Carvin tells Barron's. "It’s a positive experience when many people who go on social media get depressed or upset reading political rants or something else."

Whether that translates to a large audience in a crowded field is to be determined: Carvin declined to reveal the size of JamBios' membership. And, despite its flaws, Facebook (FB) does have 2.2 billion monthly active users.

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